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My family isn’t overly fond of cake, which got me to wondering about the history of the ritual. How is it that cake and candles are such an entrenched tradition that people who don’t even really like cake still have it at a birthday celebration?

(To be honest here, Chris at Parker Pie made this year’s birthday cake, and most of us confessed that we did, indeed, like it. So maybe it’s just the cakes we make ourselves that we’re not so fond of.)

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Moses Robinson and the Founding of Vermont by Robert A. Mello. Published by the Vermont Historical Society, 2014. 450 pages with footnotes and bibliography. $34.95

Reviewed by Paul Lefebvre

Robert A. Mello is a better historian than he is a biographer. Perhaps that’s because his writing lacks the flair we look for in reading about people whose lives merit a biography. Still his recent biography of Moses Robinson and the role he played in Vermont’s formative years has arrived at a fortuitous moment.

In 1789, Vermont’s second election for governor was thrown into the Legislature as neither candidate had achieved a majority, as required by the state’s Constitution.

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Kermit Smith regales a crowd at the Derby Historical Society with stories from his life. Photos by Joseph Gresser

copyright the Chronicle October 1, 2014

by Joseph Gresser

DERBY — Kermit Smith was canny enough to ensure a return engagement before the Derby Historical Society. When he addressed the group’s annual meeting Sunday afternoon, he held back some of his best material, promising to share stories of his political career in another talk.

The former state senator and the Legislature’s Sergeant at Arms for many years did come prepared with a collection of stories from his own life and the history of Derby.

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Vermont Beer; History of a Brewing Revolution; by Kurt Staudter and Adam Krakowski, published by the History Press, Charleston, South Carolina, 2014, paperback, 190 pages, $19.99.

Since 1991, Vermont has had more breweries per capita than any state in the nation. But for 100 years, until the Vermont Pub and Brewery and Catamount Brewing Company went into business in 1989, the state had no legal breweries.

The state’s earlier past was quite spirited, with an estimated 125 to 200 active distilleries in 1810.

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Clare Dolan, the guiding intelligence of the Museum of Everyday Life, stands outside of her young institution alongside a giant toothbrush built by Newark artist Martin McGowan. Photo by Joseph Gresser

copyright the Chronicle June 25, 2014

by Joseph Gresser

GLOVER — The word “everyday” means usual or common. It might seem, then, that the Museum of Everyday Life would be a humdrum collection of boring objects. The selection of themes covered in the museum’s four-year history — matches, safety pins, pencils, and, now, toothbrushes — might do nothing to change that view.

A visit to the museum, though, quickly upends any such preconception. Curator Clare Dolan has filled an old dairy barn with a collection of exhibits that uses dental hygiene alone as a lens through which to view the world.

It was 1777 and the American war for independence wasn’t going particularly well. George Washington’s competence had been called into question, and his second-in-command, General Charles Lee, had just been captured by the British in a daring dragoon raid that found Lee caught off guard.

The difficult General Lee had apparently abandoned caution in favor of comfort and may have left himself vulnerable in order to spend the night with a woman. But no matter the cause of his capture, some considered him, a former British officer, the hope of the American Revolution. He had military experience that Washington didn’t, and his record, at least militarily, had been a shining one, although Washington himself considered the man’s temper, and general nastiness, a detriment.

The fledgling nation desperately sought Lee’s release. It could not be procured, however, unless the Americans had a prisoner of equal stature to exchange.

At the time, William Barton — who would go on to found Barton, Vermont — was a lieutenant colonel, relatively unknown at 29, but energetic. He was born in Warren, Rhode Island, a seafaring village, where he became a hatter.

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This clipping is from a 1786 copy of the Vermont Gazette, and appears in the book The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777-1810.

copyright the Chronicle February 26, 2014

The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777-1810. By Harvey Amani Whitfield. Published by the Vermont Historical Society 2014. 140 pages with notes, documents and index. $19.95

Reviewed by Paul Lefebvre

The assertion that Vermonters kept slaves into the early years of the nineteenth century not only skews the state’s constitutional ban on slavery but also calls into the question the historical belief we have of ourselves as a people who believe in live and let live.

Surely there can be no place for such a belief where men can live off other men’s labor and sell their children. But that’s what historian Harvey Whitfield has found and documented in his new book, The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777-1810.

For those who don’t have the date on the tip of their tongue, 1777 was the year Vermonters formed a Constitution that abolished slavery. Well, not quite. What the framers actually abolished was adult slavery. The children of the new black freemen could still be for sale.

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Uncommon Law, Ancient Roads, and other Ruminations on Vermont Legal History, by Paul Gillies. Published by the Vermont Historical Society. 2013. 414 pages with index. $24.95.

Reviewed by Paul Lefebvre

People who major in history in college often find themselves going to law school once they graduate. More often, anyway, than those who major in physics or biology. Ironically, Paul Gillies, who has a master’s degree in English from the University of Vermont, reversed that familiar transition by becoming a historian after he first became a lawyer.

Fortunately, for anyone interested in Vermont history, it’s been a seamless transition. As a lawyer with a flair for writing, Gillies has given us a book that is quirky, original and highly entertaining as a study of Vermont’s past.

What’s original about Uncommon Law, Ancient Roads and Other Ruminations on Vermont Legal History, is how revealing our laws reflects our history. Not just the laws as they were passed 200 years ago, but as recent as the Ancient Road Law that was passed by the Legislature in 2006.

The key question underlying ancient roads, say Gillies, writing as an attorney, is: “What happens when the town announces it intends to develop the public road that runs through your property that nobody has traveled for several centuries?”

The question requires a legal resolution, but Gillies the historian frames its importance in a much larger context. The lasting value in finding ancient roads — those having “no nexus to the current highway map” — is to show how a town evolved, or “how the hill farms were abandoned, the villages developed, and the land subdivided.”

Politically, a republic is a country governed by laws. And to read Gillies is to see how laws mirror a country or state’s historical development.

Following the American Revolution, the country as well as Vermont did away with the British custom of judges wearing scarlet and ermine robes in court. The tradition of judges wearing robes, however, remained.

By wearing a robe, explains Gillies, “the person is covered up and the office made manifest by the costume.” And while individual judges may retire, “the robe comes back every day.”

Not to be outdone by members of the judicial branch, Vermont legislators even went one step further in 1789 by allowing members to “sit with their heads covered, except when they address the Speaker.”

Gillies, himself, appears to have little patience with some of the practices still at work today when a Latin phrase is used instead of an English one. For while it may elevate a proceeding, he says, it also has a downside for the layman who has come to court.

“Latin can be so powerful, until you have to translate it, and then it falls flat, like explaining a joke to someone who doesn’t get it.”

Property laws or those regulating trade and commerce often come in reaction to something that is causing a conflict. Gillies lays out an number of case histories on point, including those stemming from an eighteenth-century enterprise that every spring churned the waters of the Connecticut River until the early nineteen-hundreds: the log drives.

“Like the law, log driving took balance, judgment, and quickness,” he writes in verve that is typical of his style.

In 1785 the Legislature passed a law that gave an owner nine months to remove his logs from a drive that had become snared by the river. Similar laws ruled that the logs could be no longer than 20 feet and had to be marked for identification by the owner.

Throughout the decades there were laws passed that regulated log diameters and set deadlines for driving logs from one point to another.

“The present law is a museum of regulations of the log driving industry,” write Gillies. And they still remain on the books.

Selectmen determine the location of the boom in rivers and streams to hold back the logs, “and no boom may be anchored until the fees are paid,” Gillies writes.

“Should log drives come back, the law awaits them.”

Packed into this big book — which can easily be read as an anthology — is a chapter on what Gillies understandably calls “Luminaries,” former Supreme Court Justices. As profiles they run the gambit from Nathaniel Chipman — who in 1786 at 33 years old was elected to serve on the Supreme Court — to Justice F. Ray Keyser, who joined the Court in 1964.

Justice Chipman was Vermont’s foremost legal scholar, but what he contributed to the state’s legal foundation is, in Gillies’ view, the lynchpin to what we have become today as a society.

In his Sketches of the Principles of Government, written in 1793, Justice Chipman took a very benign and, at the time, radical view of human nature. People do not need a government to protect themselves from each other, because they have a natural “relish for society.”

In other words, writes Gillies, “human beings in Chipman’s view were drawn intuitively to society, order, and organization as a fulfillment of their quest for happiness and social improvement.”

Among his peers, Gillies says, Chipman was a lawyer who liked to play in deep waters but had difficulty when it came to sustaining a lawyer-client relationship.

The profiles make up a hefty third of the book, which may explain why Gillies offered a writer’s disclaimer before forging ahead.

“Each essay is a violation against the law of practicing psychology without a license, but the perfume of the temptation is irresistible against the possible odor of the risk,” he writes.

Gillies concluded his book with a lengthy examination of Act 250, whose significance for Vermont he underscores by writing:

“In 1969, there was Woodstock, Vietnam, the moon landing, the Manson murders, and Act 250.”

He credits Governor Deane Davis for seeing the need and the 1970 Legislature for following through to pursue “a public interest in traditionally private matters when it comes to land and how it is used.”

Gillies says that Act 250 has reached maturity, and traces its evolution over four decades. The results over the first ten years were mixed, or constitute what the author calls a difficult childhood. By 1980, he says the Act “had found its bearings,” after the Legislature eliminated the “ten-acre loophole,” which took away lot size as an exemption from Act 250 review.

The third decade, “its most difficult,” saw wrangles with the Legislature over membership on the Environmental Board. An Environmental Court was created. Accusations proliferated that the Act 250 process was too unwieldy. Gillies called it a time for retrenchment.

Throughout its fourth decade, which began in 2000, Act 250’s power to regulate was diminished by the Legislature and the High Court, according to Gillies.

Speaking of the Act as a process, the author writes: “It has been revised almost as often as educational theory. What other law has had to be saved so often?”

As a lawyer, Gillies has made his mark by representing towns. Before ancient roads became such a hot political issue, he may have been municipal government’s first road warrior. To that end, he is also the first historian to study the state’s past by looking at its routes of travel.

“The developing road network is a revelation of several centuries of community evolution,” he writes.

Vermont Women, Native Americans & African Americans, Out of the Shadows of History, by Cynthia D. Bittiinger. Paperback. 158 pages. Published by the History Press. $19.99.

It generally wasn’t until the 1960s that Vermont history books were written to acknowledge the fact that Europeans were not the first to inhabit this ground, Cynthia Bittinger says in this slender book. The man who finally assembled a convincing body of research on the early presence of the Abenaki, the man who finally managed to get historical mention of a people who’d been here for something like 11,000 years before Europeans were, was from Albany.

Historians generally credit Gordon M. Day with being the person who unearthed New England’s native past, Ms. Bittinger says. Mr. Day was born in Orleans County in 1911 and, as a child, played with children who were part Abenaki. He also knew the area as a place for natives to hunt and trap.

“In his adult years, he initially set out to study forest ecology, but after serving in World War II, he decided to devote himself entirely to saving Abenaki culture from oblivion,” Ms. Bittinger writes.

Mr. Day used French records (apparently more accurate — and more friendly — than British records) and Indian tradition in his research, discovering that, until the end of the eighteenth century, the village of Missisquoi, near present day Swanton, was a political hub for Western Abenaki.

Since he knew the Abenaki language, he was able to avail himself of natives’ oral tradition to reconstruct a narrative for a people who had either died wholesale, largely from European diseases they had no immunity to, or willfully vanished, either literally or figuratively, in order to avoid persecution, destitution, or sterilization.

What, Ms. Bittinger wonders, allowed for misinformation so grave that an entire people was excluded from the history books? Ethnocentricism? Lack of imagination? Lack of sources? The willingness of the Abenaki themselves to disappear?

Whatever the cause, Ms. Bittinger has done her part to remedy the omission and devotes the initial part of this book to the eastern Indian tribes.

The American Revolution seemed to spell the end of the Abenaki as a visible presence, she says. Although many pulled back into Canada, some lingered in northern Vermont.

However, the Abenaki did little to reclaim their own history, possibly because of fear of retaliation for taking captives or attacking settlers, Ms. Bittinger speculates.

Later, in the twentieth century, Abenakis would be likely to hide their ancestry if possible because revealing it could lead to involuntary sterilization through the eugenics movement, which was not only aimed at Indians, but also at the poor and the less intelligent.

Ms. Bittinger has packed an awful lot of information into this little book. Any one of the subjects she tackles here could have been a book in itself. However, the section on the natives of Vermont is the most tantalizing and left this reader, at least, yearning for more.

Ms. Bittinger is a history professor as well as a commentator and lecturer, and this book reads more like a text than a narrative, with brief, sometimes very brief, descriptions on significant events, people, and historical information. Each section ends with a “conclusion,” summing up the information that precedes it, much in the way one might write a scholarly paper.

What Ms. Bittinger set out to do, though, is admirable. “Women and people of color have been denied a usable history,” she writes in her introduction. “With a focus on landscape, military battles and government, natives, blacks and women are usually not included unless they participated in a battle or ran for office.”

But people have a need to know where they fit into the American story, she says. “I am offering this history to change the narrative of Vermont’s past, present and future.”

She says she has tried to focus on the positive, on those who worked to improve the lives of others.

Vermont has often been ahead of the curve in its efforts to afford equal rights to its people, but it’s far from perfect. For instance, passage of an Equal Rights Amendment for women failed as late as 1986.

In the nineteenth century, often women who died were not even remembered by their names on gravestones. Widows were referred to as “relicts.” Ms. Bittinger offers this example: “Experience. Relict of Samuel Wellington. Died Dec. 17, 1838. Age 69. Her first husband was Elias Bemis.”

The fact that maiden names were sometimes not included on headstones, can make tracing geneologies tough.

She moves rapidly from the grimness of that time for women, recording gains and the stories of some of the remarkable women who helped achieve them.

Ms. Bittinger’s credentials are long and illustrious. She teaches Vermont history for Community College, she’s a lecturer, she’s a founding member of the Vermont Women’s History Project at the Vermont Historical Society, a commentator on Vermont history for Vermont Public Radio, and was the executive director of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation in Plymouth for 18 years, and her commentaries on Grace Coolidge won the Edward R. Morrow Award.

If you’re looking for a captivating read, this isn’t the book, but it does impart some very useful information about Vermont history and some remarkable people who risked their lives, or at least security and prosperity, to make this state be the leader it remains in civil rights.

Ms. Bittinger has done her homework, and produced an edifying volume of work that outlines not only many of the brave and ethical people who helped push this state forward in its fight for decency and fairness, but also honestly discusses where it’s gone wrong.